Welfare Reform Bill

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ms Buck]

I beg to move amendment 31, page 5, line 29, at end add—

‘(6) Regulations are to provide for the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to review not less than annually the relationship between housing costs in the private rented sector and the level of the housing component of Universal Credit.

(7) Regulations are to provide that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions must amend the calculation of housing costs where this is necessary to ensure that at least the 30th percentile of the list of private rented properties in each locality remains affordable to claimants, in light of the review under subsection (6).’.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Amendment 32, in clause 68, page 52, line 19, at end add—

‘(4) After subsection (7) insert—

“(7A) In relation to a dwelling of which the landlord is a local housing authority or a registered provider of social housing, regulations under this section shall not permit the AMHB to be less than the actual amount of the liability in a case where a person has provided the relevant authority with such certificates, documents, information or evidence as are sufficient to satisfy the authority that the person is disabled and is living in a property specially adapted or particularly suited to meet the needs of that person.”’.

Amendment 72, page 52, line 19, at end insert—

‘(4) The Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report on the impact of subsection (3) within 12 months of the coming into force of that subsection.’.

[Ms Buck]

These amendments draw out two strands from the wide-ranging set of debates that we had in Committee on the treatment of housing costs before and going into the universal credit. In today’s DWP questions, the Secretary of State, who is in his place, told my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State that I wanted to spend more on housing benefit whereas the shadow Secretary of State wanted to spend less. I want to put it clearly on the record that nothing could be further from the truth. I do not want housing benefit expenditure to rise and never have done. Nothing would give me more pleasure than seeing lower unemployment, rising incomes and low rents in both the private and social sectors that bring down the total housing benefit bill. I believe that Governments of both persuasions have been in error over the past 30-plus years in letting housing benefit take the strain of rising housing costs, especially given the deregulation of the private rented sector in the late 1980s, rather than investing in affordable housing supply over those three decades in a way that would have helped significantly in bringing down that total cost.

What I do not want to see, and what I fear may arise from the Government’s policy, is a set of arbitrary and ill-thought-out cuts to housing benefit and, indeed, local housing allowance that create homelessness and distress for vulnerable people and cause damage to the 400,000-plus working households in private rented accommodation whose housing support is going to be cut. It is worth noting that the homelessness statistics that the Department for Communities and Local Government produced on its website last week send out a warning message. For the first time in years there has been a significant increase in the number of households declaring themselves as homeless. There was a rise of 23% in the number of people approaching local councils for housing help—26,400 people approached their local authority for help in the first three months of 2011, and 11,350 applicants were accepted as being owed a main homelessness duty in the first quarter to March 2011, which is an increase of 18% on the figure for the same quarter last year and the first rise for seven years.